Beyond the Ice Limit

by Preston, Douglas

  He felt a vibration and realized his cell phone was ringing. He pulled it out, wondering who was calling him. He hadn’t had a call in days.

  The caller ID said DEARBORNE PARK. Where the hell was that?

  “Hello?”

  “Is this Dr. Samuel McFarlane?” came the voice on the other end.

  “Yes.”

  “Please hold the line a moment. There’s someone here who’d like to speak with you.”

  20

  EVENING LIGHT RAKED the deck of the R/V Batavia, casting golden lines and shadows. An iceberg, drifting past the ship, was lit from behind by the setting sun, its edges glittering in fractures of turquoise and gold. The surface of the ocean was like a polished sheet, the air utterly still. The peacefulness of the scene, knowing how Alex would have appreciated it, struck Gideon as grotesque as he walked through the double doors into the fluorescent-lit darkness of the DSV hangar.

  The entire ship’s complement had gathered in the cavernous hangar, oddly empty with the two DSVs from the morning dive still on deck for maintenance—while of course the third was gone. The hangar was necessary, because there was no conference room big enough to accommodate everyone.

  Wordlessly, Gideon took up a position next to Glinn and Garza, standing and facing the group. The silence was absolute, but the atmosphere was anything but calm: the air was electric with tension. Gideon himself was numb with shock, unable to process what had happened on an emotional level, although—intellectually—it was all too horribly clear. He scanned the sea of faces, looking angrily for Lennart, who had overridden his attempted rescue of Alex. The chief officer was standing with Captain Tulley, Chief of Security Bettances, and a clump of other senior officers, staring carefully at nothing. He knew she had done the right thing—his actions were impulsive, self-destructive—but he nevertheless felt impotent rage mingling with the grief.

  Beside him, Glinn stood motionless, more of a cipher than ever. According to the scuttlebutt among the officers, he had apparently had a breakdown in mission control upon seeing the video of Captain Britton; he had been below in sick bay when the accident occurred. But he’d quickly recovered and now looked normal—or rather, normal for him, with his face having resumed its mask-like detachment. He was dressed in khaki pants and a beige short-sleeved shirt, his gray eyes looking out from underneath a smooth, seemingly untroubled brow.

  Gideon glanced at his watch: five PM sharp. As usual, Glinn began the meeting on the very second, stepping forward.

  “I want to apologize for my temporary incapacitation,” he said, his voice cool.

  This was met with an intense silence.

  “More important: I am terribly, terribly sorry about what happened to Alex Lispenard. I know you all liked and respected her, and that you all share my grief. It is a tragedy for this ship and for this mission. But right now, the best way we can honor her memory is by pushing ahead with our work.”

  Another silence.

  “Her death was not in vain. We successfully retrieved the black boxes from the Rolvaag. The boxes were hardened against many kinds of potential damage, including explosion and extreme water pressure. Unfortunately, it appears that at the moment of sinking, something caused a massive EMP—an electromagnetic pulse—to course through the ship. The boxes were electromagnetically shielded, but that EMP blew through the shielding and the storage media was compromised. The data is salvageable, at least most of it, but it will be a delicate, painstaking process. Hank Nishimura is handling data recovery.”

  Nishimura, a tall, thin, and alarmingly young-looking fellow, wearing a white lab coat over a loud Hawaiian shirt, gave a little nod.

  “I’ll now turn the floor over to Dr. Garza, who will provide a postmortem on the loss of Paul.”

  Garza stepped forward, his dark face furrowed with controlled emotion. “I won’t sugarcoat things. This is tough for all of us. We’re going to show you the footage we were able to recover from Alex Lispenard’s DSV, which wasn’t much: only the low-res video feed had been uploaded before the sub was lost. In addition, all the LiDAR data was lost. We have some footage of the last moments of Paul taken from the camera of John, which was nearby, piloted by Dr. Crew. My own DSV, George, was too far away to capture anything beyond the UQC audio feed. Dr. Nishimura is going to run this video and audio now, without comment. Discussion will follow.”

  He turned and a two-hundred-inch UHC flat-screen monitor, commandeered from mission control, flickered into life.

  Gideon turned to watch reluctantly. The trunk of the Baobab appeared, in low resolution, translucent in the spectral light, giving off a greenish glow. The vantage point was from the Paul as it circled the upper part of the trunk, shining its headlights at the entity. The light disclosed a dark object enclosed in a jelly-like sac, perhaps a foot and a half long, but with a strange, convoluted surface, wrapped by what looked like engorged veins. But the resolution was low and the object blurry and pixelated, and he could make out no specific details.

  Now Alex’s voice broke in. Control, this is Paul. I see something unusual at the fork of the trunk. Something dark.

  Okay, we see it, too, came the voice of Chief Officer Lennart.

  Nishimura froze the video, showing the object encased near the fork of the trunk, digitally enhanced.

  Son of a bitch, thought Gideon as he stared at the dark object. It looks like a brain.

  The video restarted and now the DSV spiraled up above the level of the fork. Gideon could clearly see the mouth, with its translucent, rubbery lips gulping water, like some gigantic, revolting fish.

  I think we just found its mouth, came Alex’s distorted voice.

  The scene unfolded in enhanced slow motion. Underneath the voice exchanges, there was that low rumble Gideon had heard earlier. He watched as the DSV was sucked in; he saw Alex struggling to move the mech arm and then the bright flash when she fired up the torch. The UQC was barely functioning and the final video stream was little more than a blur of light and shadow. But the flash of the acetylene was unmistakable, and that, it seemed, was what had triggered the creature to react, apparently crushing the DSV.

  The screen went briefly black. Then Gideon’s own video feed took over and he was viewing from a distance, once again, the eruption of bubbles from the creature—probably the outrush of air from the ruptured DSV—and then came the final, inexplicable message: Let me touch your face.

  This finally broke the agonized silence. From the assembled group came a burst of murmuring, expostulation, even a few suppressed sobs. Glinn stepped forward as the lights came up. “Discussion?” he rapped out.

  “What’s going on with that last message?” It was Lennart.

  “Our belief—myself and Dr. Brambell—is that it appears to have been some sort of hallucination, rapture of the deep, that Alex experienced as the pressure failed on the DSV.”

  “That doesn’t explain the timing,” said Lennart. “She spoke seconds after the sub was already crushed.”

  A restive murmur.

  “That,” said Glinn sharply, “is clearly a technological artifact of the UQC communications system. A delay. We’re working it out.”

  “But it didn’t come through the UQC. It was picked up on John’s hydrophone.”

  Another burst of talk.

  Glinn held up his hands. “The UQC and the hydrophone use the same acoustical system. There was a lot of sonar interference from the Baobab. It’s an imperfect audio delivery system. We’re working on an explanation.”

  Lennart retreated, an unsatisfied frown on her face.

  Prothero raised his hand.

  “Yes?”

  “Okay, you heard that low background rumble at the very end of the tape?” He looked around. “Play it again.”

  Glinn ran it through again.

  “I helped Nishimura enhance the video, and as soon as I heard that, I knew what it was.” He walked up onto the stage with a certain triumph in his face. “Here it is, sped it up ten times.” Prothero plugged
his cell phone into one of the monitor’s audio input jacks, activated it. An eerie, loon-like sound came from the speakers: half moaning, half singing.

  Prothero let it play for about fifteen seconds, then switched it off. “Classic. That’s the vocalization of a blue whale. Your acoustic network picked up a whale somewhere in the vicinity.”

  “Blue whales can’t dive anywhere near that deep,” said Antonella Sax, head of the exobiology lab.

  “No. But their vocalizations can travel for up to a hundred miles. The loudest sound ever recorded from an animal came from a blue whale. There must’ve been a pod of them traveling somewhere above, which John’s hydrophone picked up by accident. Very cool. I’ll do a triangulation and find out where those whales were when this was picked up. Great blues are not common this far south—this could be important.”

  He left the stage, looking around as if for approbation.

  “Further discussion?” said Glinn.

  Gideon raised his hand and spoke. “That dark, oblong thing inside the creature—anyone else think it looks like a brain?”

  Many murmurings of agreement.

  “If so,” he went on, “then killing this son of a bitch might have just gotten a lot simpler.”

  This observation was greeted with general assent. The discussion went on until—as it began to veer into ever more speculative territory—Glinn stepped forward and cut it off. “All right,” he told the assembled crew. “Thank you. Now I’m going to dole out some assignments. The exobiology team under Antonella Sax will examine the root-like piece Dr. Crew brought back. Dr. Sax, your team will also attempt an analysis of the organism’s internal systems—in particular, I’m interested to learn whether the creature has a brain and nervous system, and especially if that dark thing is in fact its brain. Prothero, I want you to try synchronizing the hydrophone and UQC audio streams. As for the stray whale sound, I’m not sure it’s worth spending time on.”

  Prothero shrugged.

  “Dr. Nishimura should be able to provide us with data from the black boxes in a day or two, and that will give us a lot more to work with. And the team reporting to Manuel Garza—”

  “Just a moment.” A beefy man in coveralls stood up. It was the ship’s second engineer, the man named Masterson. “What I’m not hearing is how we’re going to protect ourselves. That thing just crushed a titanium sphere engineered to withstand fourteen thousand psi.”

  It was Garza who responded. “We believe we’re safe here on the surface. The top of the Baobab is still almost two miles below us. That’s a lot of water.”

  “Pure assumption.”

  There were murmurs of assent.

  “Admit it, we’re in over our heads,” Masterson went on. “That thing down there is a lot more dangerous than you told us. I suggest we move the mother ship a safe distance away from here—like ten, fifteen miles—just in case.”

  “That would fatally impede our research,” said Glinn.

  “Yeah, but that son of a bitch has already ‘fatally impeded’ one of us.”

  Glinn let a moment pass before responding. “Alex Lispenard’s death is a shock and a tragedy. We learned something about the creature and its capabilities in the hardest way possible. But—” He cast his eyes around—“we must take risks if we’re going to terminate this thing.”

  “There are legitimate risks and then there’s foolhardiness,” said Masterson, to more murmurings. “I’d put that last mission in the foolhardy category. You sent three subs down there, one of them circling less than fifty feet from the creature. Not smart. I think we’d better back off, or maybe even rethink the whole expedition.”

  “We’re in uncharted territory,” Glinn said, with an edge to his voice now. “We don’t have the luxury of playing it safe. We must have information.” He paused, casting his gray eyes over the assembled group. “You were fully briefed on our situation. All of you understood that we would be completely isolated here. There can be no evacuation and no rescue. The one helicopter we have, an AStar, has a range of three hundred sixty nautical miles. The nearest heliport is Grytviken, on South Georgia Island—six hundred nautical miles distant. Our two launches are not rated for blue-water travel, especially in the Screaming Sixties of the South Atlantic. So for better or worse, we’re here, and we’re in this together. Now, Mr. Masterson, is it your intention to demand we back off the target site?”

  Masterson looked chastened. “All I’m asking for is a little caution.”

  “And that is perfectly reasonable. Thank you, Mr. Masterson.” Glinn glanced around with impassive eyes. “Meeting concluded.”

  As the group was breaking up, Glinn laid a restraining hand on Gideon’s arm. “Meet me down in the exobiology lab,” he said quietly. “Ten minutes.”

  21

  BY THE TIME Gideon reached the exobiology lab, Glinn was already deep in conversation with Antonella Sax, the lab’s director. They were bent over a stainless steel box with a glass top, in which the root-like tentacle he’d retrieved—remarkably thin and long—lay sealed inside. Four other technicians were busy in various corners of the spacious but crowded lab.

  Glinn motioned him over. “Dr. Sax is explaining what she and her team plan to do with this specimen.”

  Gideon had not had much contact with Sax, who was a short, stocky, serious woman with brown hair pulled back tight, glasses, about forty—smart and all business. He shook her hand and she turned back to the coiled tentacle.

  “What we have here,” Sax said quietly, “is humanity’s first real example of exobiology. That is beyond outstanding. But it presents all kinds of challenges. For example, under normal circumstances we’d be running the most painstaking and meticulous sterile procedures possible. But we don’t have time for that. We need to know as much as we can about this thing, as fast as possible. Quick and dirty. The more we know, the better we’ll be able to prepare.”

  “No quarantine procedures?” Gideon asked. “We don’t want an Andromeda Strain event.”

  “The fact is, the ship itself is a kind of quarantine—the ultimate quarantine. Before we return to port, we’ll incinerate this thing and any other parts of the creature we bring up, then sterilize the lab.”

  Gideon hesitated. He was still in shock, dazed from what happened to Alex, and he found it hard to focus. “Do you feel the ship is at risk from any sort of disease or microbes this thing might be carrying?”

  Sax looked at him, brown eyes clear. “In a word: yes.”

  “This creature is already exposed and open to the ocean,” Glinn said. “So whatever microbes it might be carrying are already present in the environment.”

  “What I find remarkable,” said Sax, “is that this specimen reached the surface, where the pressure is about four hundred times less, intact, with no obvious alteration. Normally, when you bring a deep-sea specimen up to surface pressure, it completely falls apart.”

  “So this thing can live at all depths?” Gideon asked.

  “A reasonable inference.”

  Sax went on to describe the plan of research, starting with sections of the specimen for various scans and examinations—frozen, microscope, SEM, TEM, histological. Also, she said, CAT scans, MRIs, electrical impulse tests, microbiological and biochemical analyses. “We don’t know what this is,” she told them. “Plant, animal, or something else entirely. We’re not sure what it’s made of. Does it have DNA? Is it even carbon-based? The most elementary questions still have to be answered. But by the time we’re done, our tests will tell us about its anatomy, nervous system—if it has one—the flow of fluids and electrical impulses, its cellular energy cycles—assuming it even has cells—its biochemistry and molecular biology. But for the time being…” She shook her head. “It’s like landing on an unknown planet.”

  “Then we’ll let you proceed with all haste.” Glinn turned, indicating for Gideon to follow him. Once out in the hall, and alone after turning a corner, Glinn halted. “There’s something I want to talk to you about—in c
onfidence.”

  “Of course.”

  “Back there in the meeting, I squelched speculation on Lispenard’s last words.”

  Gideon took a deep breath. “I noticed.”

  “There’s something profoundly disturbing about them, and I don’t want a lot of speculation about it.”

  “You’re…um, you’re referring to the timing?”

  Glinn looked at him steadily. “Prothero is working on that, and I do believe it has to be some kind of glitch. No: I’m referring to what she said. The meaning. Let me touch your face.”

  Gideon said nothing. She had spoken those words to him, or something very similar, the night they had spent together. My God. Was it just last night?

  “I said it was some sort of rapture of the deep. But I don’t believe that’s true. The sphere was crushed immediately. And at two miles down, there’s no ‘rapture’—death at that pressure is absolutely instantaneous. In listening to those words…I sense there’s real meaning in there, not some random, crazy utterance of a failing brain. This is something…” He paused. “Something beyond our understanding.”

  He turned his piercing gray eyes on Gideon. “This is a line of inquiry that you and I will pursue, quietly—just the two of us. I know, Gideon, what Alex’s death meant to you. I know this isn’t easy. But I also know this anomaly is something you won’t let drop until you get to the bottom of it. Prothero is working on the timing glitch. I want you to keep tabs on what he’s doing—and make sure rumors about anything he might discover aren’t disseminated haphazardly. We’ve lowered a camera to the seafloor and placed it about two hundred yards from the creature. We’re going to be watching it twenty-four seven.”

  “All right,” Gideon heard himself say.

  Glinn looked at him thoughtfully for a moment. Then, with the briefest of nods, he turned and headed back in the direction of mission control.